Well, not exactly a book and not necessarily something I recommend everybody reads, but when I was getting started (early 80's) I purchased a copy of the source code to HDOS, the HeathKit Disk Operating System (written by J. Gordon Letwin, who went on to work on IBM's OS/2). I spent many months poring over every line of 8080 assembly language code in that massive set of bound photocopies of source code printouts. The OS itself, device drivers, command shell, assembler, BASIC interpreter...everything was there. I don't think anyone can realistically do the same thing on a modern system but that experience taught me so much about programming and software engineering.
I learned regex incidentally from reading the classic book "Software Tools" (Kernighan & Plauger). It has a chapter which briefly describes the syntax but focuses on an analysis of the code used to parse & process them (in RATFOR).
Over the last 30+ years, I've found automata theory to be pretty much indispensable. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I've run across hideously complex logic that I replaced with a simple and maintainable finite state machine.
55. Just stumbled across a philosophy course online. I had always thought of philosophy as archaic, useless and boring. I could not have been more wrong.
Holy crap! this brings back memories. I actually did this many years ago with real logic gates, eventually ending up with a 4-bit CPU that could address an entire 16 nybbles of RAM. That was so much fun!
I remember these machines fondly. I suppose they were pretty Unixy, but since it was the first *nix system I was ever exposed to, it was hard for me to judge. I do remember they renamed a lot of the command line tools (like fpat instead of grep).
After working on some of the console-based systems of the time (VMS, CTOS, PC-DOS), Apollo systems seemed almost magical to me. It had a mouse and I could just click on a file to edit it (it was also my first GUI).
We used their Pascal compiler to develop software for a certain government agency. The very day that we flew to DC to install the software on their systems, they let us know that they had changed some of the fundamental requirements. Back to the drawing board...
I agree with you completely, but if I actually had a chance to talk to my 18-year old self, I'd tell him to put every penny he could spare into Apple ;-)
I handle a number of sites that require a login but need Google to index their content. I verify that Googlebot requests are actually coming from a domain owned by Google. I can't imagine that I'm the only one doing that.
